


Trust Like This Doesn't Come Easy

by astudyinpanda



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Everybody tells MacCready what to do, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Interrogation, Possibly Unrequited Love, Spoilers, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 11:22:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12910881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astudyinpanda/pseuds/astudyinpanda
Summary: After a really weird concussion, MacCready joins the sole survivor at a Railroad safehouse right before synths attack it. Somebody tipped off the Institute, and suspicion falls on the mercenary traveling with the new heavy.





	1. Chapter 1

At first, MacCready thought he'd somehow missed that suicide greenskin with the bomb. That'd explain the white light everywhere and the skull-splitting pain. Not why he was breathing, though. And not why his arm hurt so much, although that answer came roaring back with the pain. When that mutant dog sank its teeth in, his arm had broken not once but twice, along both sides of the beast's jaws. The boss shot the mutie dog off of him, but they hadn't even had time to put it in a sling before... this happened. He'd hit taken the suicider down, but he and the boss had been enveloped in blinding light anyway.

His eyes finally accommodated the onslaught of light while he gingerly found a way to hold the broken arm up with the other one. He was in a big, fancy elevator, or a small room, maybe. The floor was completely clean. The ceiling had no holes. Heck, every stick of furniture in the room beyond the metal doorway was intact, and every furnishing, too. He must have fallen into a working vault, somehow.s

He turned to comment on it to the boss, but she wasn't there. He gulped. So he'd fallen in alone. That figured.

But there shouldn't have been any vaults in south Boston, where he and the boss had been on their way to check on a Railroad safehouse. If Deacon's leg hadn't been taking longer than expected to heal, it would've been him on this operation, not MacCready. The boss was paid up with MacCready, so that was all right, except for this new vault business.

"Hello?" MacCready called. The room outside the elevator/room was small and mostly occupied by a computer console. Unless she was picking up trash behind it, there wasn't room for her to hide out there. "Boss?"

Instead of the boss, a big guy in a heavy brown coat and sunglasses (in a vault, how weird was that?) came around a corner. He carried a laser rifle, but didn't aim it at MacCready, which was something. "Robert Joseph MacCready," the guy said. It wasn't even a question. The middle name and everything. MacCready didn't spread around.

"Uh, yeah?"

"Come this way." The guy in the coat turned to one side, like he wanted to let MacCready go first.

With a laser rifle at his back. Yeah, that wasn't happening. "Where are we?"  MacCready asked.

"This is the Institute," Coat Guy said calmly.

MacCready squinted at him, but there wasn't even a hint of a smile on his face. After what MacCready had seen during the other jobs he and the boss did for the Railroad, he was willing to believe that the Institute wasn't a myth. But that it had a fully functioning, clean-as-fuck vault nobody knew about?

Come to think of it, that made sense. Where else would they hide?

"This way," Coat Guy repeated. "Now." And the gun came up, which meant he'd just been being polite, phrasing it the way he did. Standing by the elevator waiting for the boss to find MacCready wasn't an option.

The first step jarred his broken arm and stopped him in his tracks, next to the big computer console covered in lights and buttons without a speck of dirt on them. "You got some kind of high tech synth clinic in here? My arm's broken." Coat Guy would hear in his voice how much it hurt. Maybe that would keep him from shooting until MacCready could reach the .44 in his duster pocket.

"Yes." Coat Guy must've gotten tired of waiting, because he reached out fast for MacCready's healthy arm.

MacCready twisted away, but not far enough. Coat Guy grabbed his upper arm, and electricity snapped through his arm and the rest of him. All of his muscles went tight and stiff, and that was _hell_ on the broken arm. MacCready's knees locked and he lost his balance. The vice grip on his good arm kept him from falling. He just wavered on his feet, screaming through his locked jaw, while Coat Guy relieved him of his rifle, the .44, and all the knives and grenades, even his boot knife. All he felt was the heat burning through him, and his broken arm blazing, telling him shit was fucked up bad. Like he didn't already know that.

When Coat Guy let go, MacCready fell to his knees on the spotless floor, gasping through his clenched teeth. He wanted to curl over his broken arm and just sit there for a minute, but if he did, he wouldn't see what Coat Guy did next. MacCready's own muscles had pulled the bones all out of place in there. The arm throbbed on every breath. Shaking in the aftereffects of that shock he'd gotten wasn't helping.

He glared up at Coat Guy. "Bastard."

Coat Guy just watched, too far away for MacCready to grab the laser rifle, with the same blank expression he'd had this whole time. Whether or not this really was the Institute, Coat Guy had to be a synth.

A woman in a weird, two-color jumpsuit came around the corner of the hallway beyond the entranceway, with some medical-looking gadget in her hand. Her jumpsuit didn't have a vault number and the colors were white and orange, not blue.

He was a lot more worried about what she was holding in her hand. "Hey, what's that for? Don't you—"

She pressed the syringe into his neck. There was a sharp pain at the contact point, like a miniature stimpak needle going in, then nothing.

 

 

He dreamed about the boss, and the night they'd ended up in a long-abandoned backyard bunker. It was early evening, but it was dark and they'd just fought through half a supermutant army. The Brotherhood of Steel had taken the other half. "Crawl Out Through the Fallout" was playing on the radio, and he and the boss were both loopy and tired, but she somehow found the energy for a springy little dance step he'd never seen before. It was cute and it looked like half of a couple's dance, but he hadn't known what to do back then.

In the dream he knew. They danced, and nothing hurt, for once.

 

 

His eyes were open. He was sure of it. There was just no light to see by. He was on his back somewhere dusty, and when he sneezed it jarred his broken arm where it lay across his chest. The sneeze turned into something between a cough and a yelp.

"MacCready?" the boss called from somewhere above him.

Now that his eyes had adjusted, faint light filtered down from a doorway two floors up. _An elevator door. Oh._ That reminded him of something, but he couldn't think what it was. A dream, maybe? He inhaled carefully, trying not to move his arm any more than he had to. "I fell," he shouted in the direction of the open door. The might attract more supermutants, but honestly he didn't think they were smart enough to follow them into the building. "I'm down here."

"Oh thank God. I've been looking everywhere for you." The boss's pipboy lamp played over the elevator shaft wall across from the door before she appeared silhouetted in the doorway. "Are you all right?"

He set his teeth and pushed himself into a sitting position. "Arm's broken." He shifted his leg to stand up and the blaze of pain up to his hip made him amend his report to "Leg too, maybe."

"Shit." Which was MacCready's sentiment as well. "I don't suppose you're on the roof of the elevator car?"

MacCready patted the surface he was lying on and replaced all of the air in his vicinity with dust. "Feels like cement," he coughed.

"The other elevator's broken, and I don't want to call this one down on top of you," said the boss. "I'm going to find..." When she stopped, rapid shuffle-thumps and groaning echoed down the elevator shaft. "Ah, _shit._ " She disappeared from the doorway, and her energy rifle started thrumming in a steady, fast rhythm.

Ferals were coming for her, and MacCready was stuck out of reach and mostly helpless. His revolver would stop the weak ones, if they happened to fall on him, but that was about it. He was no good to her at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Just like he'd been no good to Lucy, standing right there... No, there wasn't time to think about that now. "Hang on! I'll try to meet you," he shouted. He didn't get any acknowledgement. The energy rifle shots were replaced by ear-rending shotgun blasts.

MacCready pulled himself to the elevator shaft's door. It was almost completely shut, but he found a piece of metal thin enough to shove between the doors and push with his one good arm. He leaned his whole weight on it and the door ground open along its grit-covered track.

Yellow lights on the elevator shaft walls played dimly over the room outside. Somehow, the empty, dirt-covered basement wasn't what he expected to see through the doors. What else would be there, though? "Must have a concussion," he muttered to himself.

His eyes had barely adjusted to the darkness before one of those hateful, half-dead groans bubbled up from a dark corner. He propped himself up against the door and slung his rifle off his shoulder, bracing it on his good shooting arm. "Shut up," he snarled at the feral there. It'd been crouched with its face in the corner. Now its dull eyes rolled toward the sound of his voice. He filled its face with lead, the recoil shaking his broken arm hard enough to set tears prickling at the corners of his eyes.

When the feral in the basement stopped twitching, he slung the rifle over his good shoulder and shifted it until the strap held it away from his bad one. The stairs on the other side of the room looked a long way away, in his current state. The boss's shotgun was still blasting away upstairs, though. He had to try to help.

He hauled himself up the elevator shaft door until he was standing on his good leg, and tried putting weight on the other one again. His ankle was messed up, but… He shifted carefully and took a limping step toward the stairs, then another. Yeah. It hurt. But he could do this. The boss needed his help.

At the top of the stairs, he oriented down the long hallway in the direction of the boss's gunfire. She stood on a hill of dead ferals, one foot planted on a still wriggling one's chest while she fired at others running at her. It looked like she was down to the last stragglers who'd gotten stuck behind doors or something and taken longer to free themselves than the first wave did. He lined up a shot on one that was running toward her back, and fired. The force of the bullet hitting its chest knocked it back a step, and it fell.

The boss's head whipped toward him. She'd learned to mistrust nearby weapons fire, a wise habit in the 'Wealth. When she'd confirmed that he wasn't a raider or a Gunner out to take her while she was distracted, she grinned at him and went back to shooting ferals.

Finally, she put the feral under her boot out of its misery, if it was capable of being miserable. All of the ferals were down. MacCready sagged against the wall, hurting too much to put his rifle back on his shoulder. "Fuh… Frickin' ferals."

"Yeah." The boss had rigged a huge holster kind of thing to hang her combat shotgun against her thigh, and she secured it carefully before she approached him, digging through her pack. A frown and a smear of blood, hers or a feral's, darkened her beautiful face. "I had to use one of the stimpaks."

He nodded. Speaking felt like more effort than it was worth, but he had to tell her where he was hurt. "Leg's… More important than the arm."

Her frown got deeper, and he knew she hated to have to choose. She wanted it all. No compromises for the boss. And he wanted to help her get it, most days. But they only had four stimpaks walking into this damned building, and they were going to walk out with two. She could make more at the safehouse, but it was a few hour's walk to get there, assuming he had two working legs and didn't slow her down. A lot could happen in a few hours.

She knelt in front of him, examining his leg, and he tipped his face toward the crumbling ceiling to keep from watching her. This close to his pants, she'd notice if he got all excited seeing her like that. It was a dumb crush, that was all. His brain knew a lady like her would never be interested in a guy like him, but his dick was stupidly optimistic.

Her hands were gentle against his shin when she pulled his pant leg away from his injured ankle, and, damn it, there went the optimist. "Huh," she said. "This looks like a cut, not a break. It's deep, though. One stimpak should take care of it. Ready?"

"Yeah." He clenched his good hand on his thigh and took the needle puncture on an inhale. Cool liquid flooded into his calf, and the pain started fading. In seconds, his ankle stopped hurting altogether. The pain in his arm sank to a rumble, not a roar. The ankle still felt funny, but hell, he'd fallen down an elevator shaft. That wasn't a surprise.

 

 

By the time MacCready and the boss got out of the building, the supermutants that'd driven them in there had gotten bored and wandered off. The two humans hit the road again.

MacCready's bad ankle slowed the two of them down enough that it was dark when they got to Phoenix, the safehouse that almost wasn't. It was in the back of a Red Rocket station, and it'd gone silent right before the big Institute attack that'd wiped out most of the Railroad a few months ago. Everybody had assumed it'd been hit too, but it'd actually gone dark on its own.

Its caretaker, a harried woman named Teresa (with an ay sound, not an ee, he'd been informed), had been warned, and she'd acted fast. She'd saved four synths and seven Railroad operators on the night of the Institute raid. When the boss had arrived on her doorstep to reconnect her with the Railroad courier network, she'd apparently broken down in tears. MacCready hadn't seen that in person. The boss had been traveling with Deacon at the time.

The woman was back to her usual self now, though. She took one look at MacCready's arm and clucked her tongue in obvious disapproval. "Fixer, don't you know how to fix people? Get in here, mijo, come come." She beckoned for MacCready to follow her through the Red Rocket's doorless front doorway.

"We ran into some supermutants on the way and had to use the last two stimpaks," MacCready said as he stepped inside. "Not the boss's fault."

"So you say." Teresa shook her head and rummaged through a rag pile until she found a clean one. Once he managed to get his coat off without whimpering too loudly, she proceeded to wipe the blood off his arm.

"I'm making more stimpaks right now," the boss promised. She knew her way around Phoenix, he guessed, because she left the room purposefully without asking where the chem station was.

Shit -– stuff -- was always falling off these old buildings. He almost didn't recognize the metallic clack when something small landed in the doorway. Almost, but he'd been running the 'Wealth a long time now, and that wasn't a sound you forgot, if you heard it once. He shoved Teresa into the Red Rocket's back room and put his back to the door, just as the grenade went off.

It didn't make the boom he'd braced himself for. There was some kind of buzzy thump instead. The synth who'd been hiding out at the station dropped flat on his face. Teresa was yelling something in Spanish, the boss was shouting for somebody to tell her what was going on, and a mechanical voice was saying something about not wanting to "cause you undue pain."

"Institute toasters!" MacCready shouted for the boss's benefit. He was already pulling the laser pistol she'd given him to take out what the railroad called "Gen 2's" faster. He turned his good side toward the synths to put an unbroken patch of wall between himself and the incoming laser bursts.

The boss's footsteps behind him were not quite enough warning before the stimpak needle jammed into his bad arm. He shouted in pain and missed the shot he'd lined up on one of the synths.

"Sorry," the boss yelled over gunfire. Teresa and another Railroad agent had joined the fight, blazing away at the synths with modified pipe pistols.

The fight was nasty, but short. By the time it was over, Teresa was down with a laser burn to the thigh, the other Railroad agent got his face cooked off by the synths. The boss's armor was so hot it was smoking from the dirt it was burning off its surface. But all the synths were dead, or whatever passed for dead when you weren't quite alive to begin with.

So was the synth that'd been hiding at Phoenix. The man – what else was MacCready supposed to call him? He looked like one – didn't have a visible injury on him, aside from a nose that'd broken when he fell.

"He's not breathing." Teresa crawled to him and accepted a stimpak from the boss. Even when the stimpak emptied into the fugitive synth's chest, the guy didn't breathe, or move. Even the boss's friend, Nick Valentine, healed from stimpaks, and from what MacCready understood, Valentine was an older model.

MacCready slid down the wall to sit on the floor and take the weight off of his ankle. Teresa stuck a stimpak in her leg, shouting in furious Spanish which turned miserably sad when she took in what'd happened to the other Railroad agent. MacCready was kind of glad he couldn't interpret what she was saying, because he was pretty sure he understood well enough. The boss stayed on one knee beside the dead synth, head hanging low.

"We did the best we could," he told her softly.

She sighed. "It wasn't enough."

Teresa, her face streaked with tears, turned toward MacCready with a scowl like a radstorm. "You." She leveled her pistol at his face. "You're new. Who are you? Who are you working for?"

"Hey, let's just talk about this." The boss stepped between Teresa and MacCready, with her back to him. She was standing between him and a goddamned gun. She didn't have to do that, but he wasn't about to stop her. He took the opportunity to push himself up the wall until he was upright, and could run if he had to. "He's working for me," the boss said. "I hired him weeks ago, to help me take down some raiders outside Diamond City. He's a friend."

"You, we know," Teresa growled. "Can you prove _he_ isn't working for the Institute?"

"I used to live in Goodneighbor," MacCready said. "Heck, I still have some stuff in a locker there. Everybody in Goodneighbor hates the Institute. Ask White Chapel Charlie at the bar, or, or Daisy at the general store. They'll tell you, I would never--"

"I can't go to Goodneighbor," said Teresa. "People need me here. Oh, God…" She lowered the shotgun and turned her head, taking in the dead synths and the Railroad agent's mangled face. Looking back to the boss, she said "Send somebody to help me move, okay? Phoenix is burned. In fact, I'm gonna burn it for real. Tomorrow. And get that fucking Institute sympathizer out of here." She turned and made her way to the Railroad agent, to drag him out of the street.

The boss shouldered her laser rifle and stood. "Come on. We'd better go."

MacCready glanced over at her, eyes wide. The boss didn't believe this crap, did she? "I'm not--"

"I know." She walked out into the night, and he hurried after her. "But we need to find someplace to camp."


	2. Chapter 2

They slept in a house with two and half good walls, a fireplace, and hardly any feral ghouls. In the morning they started winding their way through the 'Wealth toward Railroad HQ in Boston. On the way, they sent a message with a courier who doubled as a caravan guard. The boss had some detours to make, but the caravan was going straight to Bunker Hill. The message would reach Railroad HQ before he and the boss got there in person.

The boss didn't say a word about Phoenix on the way. That wasn't so unusual. She didn't like to talk about Railroad business on the road. The hit on the safehouse had gotten to her, though. She barely said anything to the provisioners they passed, and usually she was asking them all about their kids and their settlement and what they'd seen on the way.

Everybody at Railroad HQ looked down, too. The coordinator guy who greeted them when they arrived handed them coffee, watery but warm and smelling clean. "Desdemona is getting people together for a strategy meeting," he said, kind of apologetically. "She wants you to sit in."

The boss nodded. "Got it. Thanks, Drummer Boy." To MacCready, she said "Get comfortable. It's going to be a while."

Conversation stopped when they got to the main workroom. All the agents who were awake turned toward the new arrivals. The boss was a celebrity around here, on account of a courser she'd destroyed. These stares weren't hero worship, though. They weren't even friendly. And they were all directed at him.

The boss ignored all of them. "Desdemona," she greeted the Railroad's leader.

"Glad you're here. We got your message and there's more to talk about." A cigarette was smoked down almost to Desdemona's knuckles, and she held it out to invite the boss to the back room where the Railroad's analysis robot stayed.

MacCready smiled tentatively at the agents nearest him. "Uh, hi."

Nobody said anything back. They weren't all that friendly at the best of times, but this was something else. Maybe Teresa had sent a message too, and they all thought he was an Institute traitor. Great.

He sat on the couch nearest the back exit to the base, in case he had to use it himself. Ordinarily he'd take off his armor, too, but the way these people were watching him made him want to keep it on. He took a big sip of his coffee. If there was any stimulant value in it at all, he was going to need it.

The coffee was apparently too watered down to work, or the comfortable, dry couch in a dry, underground space was getting to him, because MacCready started feeling sleepy after only a few minutes. He set his mug on the edge of a rickety end table before he dropped it.

Deacon stepped out of the shadows to pick it up. His leg was still wrapped in stiff leather, but it didn't look like it was slowing him down much. "Hey, pal, long day on the road?"

At least somebody in the Railroad still wanted to talk to him. "Yeah, guess so."

"Don't worry about it. I sleep on that couch all the time. It's real comfortable." Deacon splashed some water from a bucket near Doc Carrington's chair into the mug, dried it off, and handed it to the doctor, which was kind of weird. As second in command, shouldn't Carrington have been in the meeting with Desdemona and the boss? Carrington was watching MacCready as carefully as everybody else in HQ was, but something about his clinical, assessing gaze was particularly unsettling.

The doc… The coffee… "Deacon…" And it was getting really hard to talk. Ah, _shit._ "Did you put… something… in…" MacCready's eyes closed.

 

 

When MacCready woke up, he was somewhere dark, and it wasn't heated like Railroad HQ. Lantern light flickered against stone walls. They were still underground. He could tell by the air, and the faint smell of decay.

His head hurt, and his mouth was bone dry. When he moved to look for something to drink, metal dug into his wrists. Worse, his legs were tied to the chair he was sitting in. That woke him up the rest of the way.

"With all the bigwigs in their strategy meeting, I didn't want you to feel left out." Deacon was leaning against the wall, just outside the reach of the lantern's light, and his voice bounced eerily around the stone room. On the floor next to him, the leather leg brace he'd had on lay like a dead thing, discarded. The sunglasses he always wore reflected the lantern's orange glow like lights on armed frag mines. "I figured we could have a meeting of our own."

"This isn't funny." MacCready rattled the handcuffs against the back of the chair.

"You know what else wasn't funny? Phoenix getting burned." Deacon stepped into the lantern light. "That courier who carried the news to Bunker Hill disappeared too, right after she passed the message on. Didn't even tell her caravan boss she was leaving. Caravan guards sure are flakey, right? Except nobody's seen her in two days. If she were just running off to Diamond City or Goodneighbor to get her kicks, somebody would've seen her. And what do these two unfortunate events have in common?"

MacCready swallowed hard, an awful dragging feeling in his dry throat. "Look, I don't know why you people won't believe me, but I am not working for the Institute. I had nothing to do with any of that. I work for Nora."

"Because she hired you." Deacon stood in front of him, so close that his sunglasses reflected MacCready's angry, worried face. "Word is you only charged her 200 caps to follow her across the Commonwealth whenever she asks. Pretty poor negotiating for a mercenary who claims he needs the money. It's almost like somebody else is paying you, too."

Now, that was just rude. "I _really_ needed a client right then. I have problems of my own, and they're not your d… They're none of your business."

Deacon picked something up off the shelf the lantern sat on. When the object crackled with blue sparks, MacCready recognized it as one of the shock batons the early model synths sometimes fought with. He clenched his hands behind him. A synth had gotten close enough to hit him with one, once. They hurt like hell. "Aw, come on, the boss wouldn't hang around with an Institute spy. She hates them as much as anybody does."

"When you're not with her, she hangs out with a supermutant and an ex-raider." Deacon grinned, without turning off the shock baton. "And me. I admire her, but she has bad taste in friends."

"So now what, I lie and say I work for the Institute, and you kill me, or I tell you the same thing I've been telling you and you beat on me with that thing? What the hell kind of choice is that?" MacCready was shouting, and swearing, and he sounded as scared as he felt, but maybe the boss would hear him and come and stop this before it got really bad.

"Convince me." Deacon swung the baton and MacCready watched, like it was in slow motion, as the weapon arched down and slammed into his knee, on the same side as his barely healed ankle.

The blow hurt bad enough to make him cry out, and the shock hit him so hard he would've fallen, if he'd been standing. Electricity burned up to his hip and down to his foot, and somehow it set off his ankle again. The wound there flared to bright, burning life. It went on burning long after the shock dissipated. MacCready's voice was doing something weird, between growling and moaning, because it hurt and it wasn't fucking stopping, _what the hell?_

Deacon turned off the shock baton and dropped it. "Hey, what's happening? Where's it hurt?"

"Right ankle," MacCready ground out, "you _asshole._ "

Deacon crouched beside him and untied that leg. MacCready tried to kick him, but Deacon dodged out of the way. "Let me look at it. Something's wrong."

"No fucking kidding! You just shocked the shit out of it!"

"Yeah," Deacon said, as if that was a revelation. He grabbed MacCready's leg and took his boot and sock off, exposing the still-healing cut. When he looked back at MacCready's face, his expression was deadly serious. "I think you've got something in there that's shorting out."

"So now you think I'm a _synth?_ " His ankle felt like it was cooking from the inside. MacCready couldn't help letting out another pained, disgusted groan.

"No, I think somebody put some kind of device in there." Deacon let go of his leg and shifted sideways, out of kicking range. "You want it out now, or do you want to wait for me to get the doc?" He sounded a lot more sympathetic than he had a minute ago.

"Get it out. Get it out!" MacCready was sweating and shaking with the pain and he had no idea how long it'd take Deacon to find Carrington and bring him to whatever corner of the crypt they were in.

Deacon pressed MacCready's leg against the chair, then pulled a switchblade from a pocket and flipped it open one-handed. "Try to stay still." And without any other warning, he dug the blade into the closed wound.

MacCready groaned at the sharp, stabbing addition to his misery and squeezed his eyes shut tight. His fingernails dug into his palm. All he could think about was how much he wanted to kick Deacon in his goddamned face for this, and how much blood could come out of a leg wound.

And then, all of a sudden, the burning and cutting stopped. MacCready was still breathing hard from how bad it'd been before, but he forced himself to look down. Sitting in a puddle of his blood, a tiny mechanical device was spewing sparks. "What… the heh… heck is that?" he panted.

"Dunno." Deacon was a few steps away, getting something else off the shelf with the lantern. He came back with the bottom piece of a broken vase or urn, which he used to scoop up the device. A smear of MacCready's blood stained the dusty ceramic surface. "I'm going to take it to Tinker Tom. He'll know what it does, and where it came from, but I'd bet twenty caps that it's been broadcasting sound or location or something from you to the Institute." He faced MacCready with an unhappy frown. "You really didn't know this was in there, did you."

"No, 'cause like I've been saying, I'm not a spy." MacCready's leg felt a lot better now that it wasn't actively being burned, but he was still tied to a chair and bleeding all over the crypt floor. "You letting me go now, or what?"

"Yeah." Deacon untied MacCready's other leg, and went around behind the chair to the handcuffs. "Give me a second, here. I don't actually have the key to these."

"Oh, great."

 While he was messing with the handcuffs, Deacon said, "The case against you was pretty solid. I had to follow up on it. It would've been stupid not to."

"Oh, yeah, that's a totally understandable reason to torture a guy." MacCready hoped his sarcasm was evident.

The truth in the statement gave him pause, though. He'd just been drugged, and interrogated. Well, Deacon had only hit him once, but he'd made it pretty clear that he'd keep hitting him if he thought he had to. And sometime before that, somebody had cut into his leg and put something _in_ him.

He thought he might know when that'd happened. It was in the building full of ferals, when he'd fallen down the elevator shaft and dreamed about being in a super clean vault… Or in the Institute. What if that wasn't a dream? Except, how the heck could the Institute have gotten him, when he never left the building?

Something clicked behind him. "Take that, lock," Deacon said, almost cheerfully. The handcuffs fell away and MacCready eased his arms forward. His shoulders had gotten stiff. "You'd better follow me back," said Deacon. "We did a bunch of digging to hook this place into the sewer system, and it's easy to get lost."

MacCready launched himself out of the chair and used his momentum turning around to power a haymaker punch to Deacon's face. The impact knocked Deacon's sunglasses off and staggered him back two steps, into a wall. MacCready glared at him and shook out his hand.

"Ow." Deacon probed his jaw carefully with his fingers, then picked up the sunglasses and studied them for cracks. His eyes were surprisingly small for his face, after seeing him in glasses for so long. Apparently the glasses were all right, because he put them back on. "We even now?"

"Yeah, sure." MacCready gritted his teeth and stuffed his bleeding foot back into his sock, then his boot, while Deacon strapped the leather brace back around his leg. It was starting to sound like MacCready really had been responsible for Phoenix and the missing courier, even though there was no way he could've known what was happening. He guessed he couldn't blame Deacon for taking what he thought were the appropriate steps. MacCready's knee still ached, though. "Let's go."

 

 

Their arrival and the subsequent delivery of the implanted device to Tinker Tom set the whole headquarters staff into an uproar. It must've broken up the meeting, too, because Desdemona and the boss walked out of the back room with matching concerned frowns. "What's going on here?" Desdemona demanded.

"The merc had some kind of machine in his leg," Deacon said, smoothly leaving out how he'd discovered it. "I cut it out of him. Tom's analyzing it now."

"You did _what?"_ The boss gave Deacon the kind of glare she usually reserved for raiders who were hassling her provisioners. MacCready would not want to be on the wrong side of that.

"It's the real deal!" Tom called from his lab across the room. "Genuine Institute tech right here. Found the mic and the transmitter, so I know it was sending out audio. Oo, boy, I'd better scan him to make sure there isn't anything else jammed in there." MacCready shuddered.

"Is it still transmitting?" Desdemona asked. That shut everybody up fast.

Tom glanced up from his new project, looking hurt. "No, Des, that's the _first_ thing I checked. Give me some credit."

"Are you all right?" The boss was standing next to MacCready now, looking him over critically.

"Actually, I think there's a hole in my ankle," he admitted. "And some jerk whacked my knee with a shock baton."

The boss helped him over to Doc Carrington and cast a baleful glare at Deacon. Deacon, satisfyingly, looked like he was wishing he could turn on a stealth boy and disappear. "You stay here," she told him. "I'll be right back."

"Not going anywhere," said MacCready. The boss stalked toward Deacon, and MacCready really appreciated how she looked storming away.

 

 

Some nights they crashed on mattresses at Railroad HQ, but tonight both MacCready and the boss were sick of the place. They pushed on toward one of the settlement farms to the north in near silence. MacCready was still thinking about the Institute dream-that-wasn't-a-dream. The courser that'd grabbed him. The way the Institute had _used_ him, to put the boss and everybody they talked to in danger.

Having the boss's friends turn on him hadn't helped. God, Deacon could be a terror when he wanted to be. But the boss had stuck by him. That meant something. Heck, that meant everything.

"How're you doing?" she asked over her shoulder.

"Got ammo, caps, and miles of road ahead," MacCready said, with maybe a little less than his usual enthusiasm, but it'd been a heck of a day. "Couldn't be better."


End file.
